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Until My Resurrection

by César Vallejo
translated by P. Scott Cunningham

January 6, 2016

If César Vallejo had been born in the South Bronx in the early 1960s instead of in rural Peru in the 1890s, I like to think he would have been a cofounder of hip-hop. His style is a mixture of traditional and folk influences; he wrote with his ear, not with his eye; and he was certainly no friend of the authorities, spending a year in jail on what were likely false charges. The grandson of two Spanish priests who both married indigenous women, Vallejo was the embodiment of postcolonial South America. He was Catholic, trained by the Western academy, and well schooled in literature and philosophy, but he was also a shepherd, a mystic, and a member of an oppressed underclass. Like all of my hip-hop heroes, Vallejo was intelligent and talented and unafraid to let the world know about it.

As in the best classic raps, Vallejo’s rhymes are built on three- and four-syllable combinations. He takes full advantage of traditional forms but also breaks out of them. He invents words and changes pronunciations. “Until My Resurrection” looks like a sonnet with a four-line envoy, but behaves nothing like one: there’s no argument or resolution. In “Paris, October 1936,” the image of a man erasing his own shadow is matched by the rhyme (a kind of mirror) and the anaphora of lines and phrases. Even in a sad poem like this one, Vallejo brags. His disappearance from a world that does not value him becomes a magic trick of his own doing, and perhaps the completion of the trick, the real “alibi,” is that so many of us are still trying to make him reappear. —PSC

Click anywhere below to view the original Spanish poems.

UNITY

Held to my dark temple, my watch’s
tongue gasps for breath like the plug
of a revolver. Beneath the trigger, it tosses
over, never finding the slug.

The white moon, immobile, is an eye
that weeps as it aims; the Mystery is a plug
wedged into a conceptual lie,
ovoid and hostile, a russet slug.

O hand that constricts, that menaces
behind every door, that sings a melody
into every clock—yield and perish!

Into the gray spider of its frame
another great Hand, made of light, carries
a bullet in a heart’s blue shape.

UNTIL MY RESURRECTION

Until my resurrection, from this stone
my Achilles-free heel will spring,
with its record of felonies, its bones
of ivy, its obstinacy, its olive sprigs.

Until my resurrection, wandering home
from fountain to fountain with the outspoken
posture of a one-legged vagrant, I know
a man must be good, without exception.

Until my resurrection and until I can walk
among my judges as the animal I am,
our one brave pinky will grow colossal and august—
an infinite finger on a finite hand.

PARIS, OCTOBER 1936

From everything, I will be the thing that leaves.
I leave behind this bench, this pair of slacks,
my grand state of affairs, my solitary acts,
my half of a life, year by year,
from everything I will be the thing that leaves.

From the Champs-Élysées or as the curve
of the moonlight weirdens the street,
my passing passes, my birth ceases;
surrounded by people, alone, spurned,
my resemblance to a human turns
around and erases his shadow, piece by piece.

I walk away from the world, because the world
stays behind to give me an alibi:
my shoe, its eyelet, its muddy sole,
even the bend of the elbow
in my shirt, folded lengthwise.

About The Author

Peruvian expatriate César Vallejo (1892-1938) was a major 20th Century poet known for the authenticity and originality of his work. Deeply rooted in a mixed European and Peruvian Indian heritage, his poetry expresses universal themes of the human condition through the lens of his own painful experiences as an inmate in a Trujillo prison, as an expatriate political activist, and as a witness of the devastating Spanish Civil War. He died in Paris of a chronic illness in 1938.

About The Translator

P. Scott Cunningham lives in Miami, Florida, where he serves as poetry editor of The Miami Rail and director of O, Miami and Jai-Alai Books. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Awl, A Public Space, Tupelo Quarterly, Court Green, PANK, The Rumpus, RHINO, and Columbia: a journal of art + literature, among others. He is the translator of The Sun Like a Big Dark Animal, a zine of selected work by Alejanda Pizarnik, and the co-translator of Last Night I Dreamt I Was a DJ (Jai-Alai Books, 2014), the first U.S. publication by the Dominican poet Frank Báez. Other Vallejo translations of his have appeared in Waxwing.